The Culture of ”Crossroads”: the Emergency of Blues as a Countercultural Declaration

• Main Author: M. P. Zamotin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Saint Petersburg Electrotechnical University 2021-01-01
• Series: Дискурс
• Subjects: sociology of music; anthropology of music; ethnomusicology; folk music; social inequality; african-american blues musical tradition
• Online Access: https://discourse.elpub.ru/jour/article/view/363

Introduction. Apart from classical academic musicology, sociology, social anthropology and related disciplines such as sociolinguistics, philology, and cultural studies contributed to the development of research of music and its role in social, interpersonal relations, and individual experiences. The aim of this research is to investigate musical and singing traditions within the context of social relations, historical challenges, and sub-cultures by sociological and social anthropological approaches. In the last decades these research is of relevance for scholars interested in creativity and creative individuals whose impact effect is ambient in current social and political processes. The main tradition can be approached as a socio-cultural phenomenon emerging in the form of sub-culture.Methodology and sources. Methodological b ackground o f t his r esearch i s o f s tructuralfunctional character. Within this framework art and creativity can be approached by various sets of research techniques. Culture of music can be studies both as an object and as a text; hence, textual and contextual approaches are of significance. In result, we can discover reasons motivating people to influence social relations and preconceptions within certain groups and societies. This approach allows the analysis the connections between individual and collective perceptions of people regarding their identities and place in a society. Finally, not only music shapes the context of sociolultural phenomena, but it is the context itself per se. For this paper I used texts and bibliographic data of singers such as follows: Son House, Robert Johnson, Skip James, William Samuel McTell, Edward W. Clayborn.Results and discussion. The analysis of social history of blues in the end of the nineteenth and in the beginning of the twentieth centuries as well as biographies of bluesmen along with the texts of their songs clearly demonstrates poetic motifs, individual and social reflections of different communities. The images such as love and flirt, manqué love, rest from hard work, roads, railways, trains, abandoned home with simultaneous lack of home, prison, illness, death and cemetery as well as the demonstration of all the listed images by socially oriented creativity in music, represents deep forms of marginality of those who sing it out in front of respected citizens living normal lives.Conclusion. The material scrutinized in this paper clearly shoes that blues as a genre of music along with bluesmen who are representatives of a certain sub-culture, constitute a coherent social system which can be characterized a s a c ounter-culture. This social and cultural phenomenon in a way we encounter it derived from marginal status of its representatives. This marginal status becomes visible in blues as emotion and soulreflection to a large degree contradictory to the idea of respectable citizens and so-called “right way of life”.